I have always been a believer that people should have choice in how they deploy their ERP software, but I have always voiced my opinion on SaaS ERP. People overall want their financial data close to home. Business owners and executives are okay with their prospects, email and backup in the cloud, but financial data is lagging behind. That is not to say that it is wrong to uses a SaaS environment, it is just many still don’t want it.

I just read an article in “Accounting Today” regarding a survey IFS sponsored with executives in the mid to large industrial market. The survey confirmed my opinion that SaaS is just not accepted by the majority. While executives are open to on-premises, they are also exploring a hosted “cloud” environment. But they want to own their software, and have their data where they are in control. The majority of our clients do not want Saas and are even leery about the cloud. So what I did, is put two servers here in the GWA offices and one in the cloud just to see if there is a difference. Keep posted and I will let you know our experience.

Last night I attended an event for the IT industry put on by IT World Canada (a trade publication for the IT industry). IDC is a top firm for collecting statistical information for the IT industry. It was quite interesting to hear from IDC that of all the big data that is collected on the internet about we individuals, that overall this data is not being analyzed. IDC’s study says that only 23% of the data collected is even useful, but that less than 1% of this data is being analyzed. So at least for now, it is not as big of a concern as we thought it was. Even in data in the small to medium business sector, data is just not being analyzed.

Think about how much data you enter into your accounting, HR and CRM system. Do you analyze it regularly? By the “feel” of things, most sales people know who their top customer is but does the business owner know who the bottom customers are? How about how much it really costs to keep those slow moving items on the shelf? I would love to hear from you about your experience in this area. Do you analyze this type of data? Do you just focus on the “good” data and not the “bad”? Do you need to analyze more data? Do you know how?